My love of Ty Segall is pretty well documented around here, and I'm a pretty big T Rex fan, so what's not to like about the already retro-minded Segall doing an EP of T Rex covers?
The result is more or less what you'd expect, as long as you expect Segall to take ample liberties. There's nothing as scandalous as his blistering take on Diddy Wah Diddy here, but if you'd never heard of T Rex, you'd be forgiven for assuming this was an EP of originals. The thundering, fuzzy bass, shredded vocals, and garagey production are tempered by only the barest glammy sheen. This sounds straight out of an alternate reality where Marc Bolan had been closer to Iggy Pop than David Bowie, and where he went for it even harder than The Stooges did.
Well, when he goes for it, that is. The even-numbered, faster tracks give Ty room to kick his legs out and really show the 70's what he would've been made of, but on the slower tracks he seem weighed down by the ghost of Bolan, aping a soaring, balladic style that's outside his wheelhouse. Maybe Ty's a victim of his own success: he's so adept at slamming out a few dozen songs like this a year that he scarcely needs the blueprint, and it becomes a burden.
The result is a must-hear-once artifact for fans that fall into that center slice of that Ty / T Venn diagram. After that first listen, just pluck the best tracks for your mixes of scuzzy, glammy glory 3.5/5
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